Total pages in book: 113
Estimated words: 106422 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 532(@200wpm)___ 426(@250wpm)___ 355(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 106422 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 532(@200wpm)___ 426(@250wpm)___ 355(@300wpm)
I love you, Diya. Now and always.
* * *
—
My knees hit the earth. Hard. Pain was a starburst in those knees, vibrating up my thighs, but I still had Diya in my arms. I didn’t care about anything else.
Rising with a grunt, I began to run again.
Sirens wailed in the distance as the neighbor scrambled up and ran ahead. He was yelling at his wife and kid about a possible survivor. The woman pelted toward me at that, and I suddenly remembered what Diya had mentioned the other day. A nurse—the woman was a senior nurse. Worked in the same hospital at which Diya’s parents were consultants.
“It’s too close!” I yelled to her when she made a motion for me to put Diya down so she could examine her.
Staring behind me at the fireball of the house, she nodded, and the two of us made our way to the manicured grass on one side of the drive, across from where I’d parked the Alfa Romeo. “She’s hurt,” I said as I put my wife down with care. “There’s blood.” I couldn’t make the word “stabbed” come out of my mouth again.
If I didn’t say it, maybe it wouldn’t be true.
“She might’ve sustained an injury getting out if she escaped through a shattered window.” The nurse was taking Diya’s pulse as she spoke, now placed her ear by Diya’s mouth. “Faint but present pulse, shallow respiration.”
She began to open up Diya’s cardigan. “Let me see if I can find the main wounds so we can put pressure on them at least—though it sounds like the fire department and the ambulance are almost here. We told them there might be injur—”
Her voice broke off. “Oh my God.” A whisper.
The top of Diya’s dress was soaked red. Obscene, every bit of white eclipsed, the yellow flowers turned scarlet.
“On her neck.” I touched my fingers just above the wound that bled sluggishly, my hand holding a visible tremor. “We have to stop it.”
“Right.” She snapped out of it. “Joseph! Give me your T-shirt!”
Even as her son rushed to obey, I stared helplessly at the saturated front of Diya’s dress and the splashes elsewhere. “Those are knife wounds, aren’t they?” I asked, even as I held the wadded-up T-shirt to the wound.
I wanted her to tell me I was an idiot, that these were clearly wounds from going through a glass window. I was ready to believe anything that would make even a remote lick of sense.
The nurse wouldn’t meet my gaze but gave a jagged nod, her blond hair lifting in the wind coming off the lake.
Running feet, two paramedics coming down next to her.
The fire crew raced past us to assess the situation at the same time, their heavy gear making their footsteps thunder on the earth and their shouts to each other blurring into a heavy buzz in my head.
Then one of them yelled directly at us. “Can any of these cars be moved? We can’t get the appliance in!”
It jolted me up. “Yes!” I called back and dug into my pocket before realizing I’d left the fob in the car.
My fingers painted red streaks on my jeans.
Not allowing the meaning of that color to sink into my brain, I ran to the Alfa Romeo and pulled another electronic key off the small bundle. It was a spare to the Mini. Diya had ordered one for each of her parents so they could move her car out of the way if she accidentally blocked them in and they had to leave for the clinic or the hospital.
Seeing that the nurse was still crouched down beside the paramedics, I threw her husband the spare fob, and the two of us jumped into the vehicles to reverse them purposefully into the grassy ditch on one side. With the fire truck already in the drive, it was easier to do that than attempt to back out.
Two of the fire crew had smashed the window of the Lexus to allow them access to the vehicle’s controls. Its alarm shrieked as they put it into neutral to roll it out of the way. As soon as I’d reversed my vehicle, I ran over to smash the window of the Mercedes. The neighbor, seeing what was happening, came over to help me push that car off the drive, too.
It wouldn’t budge.
“Fuck! It’s the newest model!” Diya’s brother had purchased it after I arrived in the country. “Probably has some safety or security features we don’t understand!”
The cacophony of the Lexus’s alarm going off drilled into my skull, spearing through the roar of the fire.
“It’s fine!” the neighbor yelled back before jumping away from the drive. “They have enough room!”
The fire truck rumbled past only seconds later.
Sweat pouring down my face from the heat blazing off the house, and my T-shirt stuck to my skin, I ran back to Diya the instant I could duck behind the truck.